The proposed research is a continuation of early work examining sub-cultural conceptions of mental illness and the implications of these conceptions for the psychiatric referral process in a culturally heterogeneous community. Previously we have found significantly different emphases in the behavioral indices of disorder for groups differing by race and social class. There is high congruity between white, upper and middle class conceptions and those of mental health professionals and professionals usually involved in the referral systems of a community. In the proposed research, lengthy interviews will be conducted with 360 Durham, North Carolina laymen. Factors of sex, race, and social class (determined by education and occupation) will employ in the sampling design. A similar age range of subjects in each cell of the 12 cell design will be maintained. Subjects will be interviewed by female interviewers of the same racial identity as the interviewer. The interviewer will present subjects with vignettes describing a coherent set of presumably deviant or disordered behaviors and a set of questions relating to the interviewers reactions and opinions about each hypothetical person will asked. These questions will deal with the meaning of the behavior (labelling implications), perceived degree of deviance of the behavior from normal behavior, the nuisance value of the behaviors, thoughts about caus@s of the behavior, and ideas about help seeking, remediation or social control for the individual described in each vignette. The vignettes will be selected from those behavior clusters already found to have quite different mental illness implications for our differing sub-cultural groups. The interviews are designed to explicate the basis for these differences as well as to get a picture of the help seeking orientations in these sub-cultures. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: Coie, J.D., Costanzo, P.R., and Cox, G. Behavioral determinants of mental illness concerns: A comparison of "gatekeeper" professions. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1975, 43, 626-636. Cox, G., Costanzo, P.R., and Coie, J.D. A survey instrument for the assessment of popular conceptions of mental illness. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1976, in press.